What is Centralized Certificate Store (CCS) and how to use it?

CCS (Centralized Certificate Store) is feature we started using after IIS 8. It allows IIS to pick up website certificates from a network share instead of the local certificate store. For environments with multiple IIS servers, this is a feature that makes system administrators’ lives a lot easier. All you need to do is to add an IIS binding that points to CCS.

There are two steps to use CCS:

  1. Configure IIS to use CCS (a server-level setting in IIS)
  2. Add an IIS binding to your website. You can do it by
    • Using IIS Manager OR
    • Using PowerShell